Difference Between Love and Hate

Love and hate are antonyms, i.e. they are two opposite terms in meaning. Even though they mean complete opposites, they are two of the strongest emotions we human beings are capable of feeling. In this article, we are going to look at the difference between love and hate.

What is love?

Love is a feeling of deep affection. It is often associated with other positive feelings like caring, warmth, and happiness. Love is generally an emotion we feel towards a close person. Love can be called a complex emotion because the love we feel towards a person differs according to the familiarity with that person. Love we have for our mother is different from the love we have for our sister. Motherly love is tinged with emotions like warmth, caring, kindness and protectiveness while sisterly love is tinged with things concepts like friendship, warmth and even jealousy! Love you feel towards your partner, i.e. romantic love, is shaded with a different set of emotions like passion and attraction.

When we analyze love in a morphological and syntactic sense, this word is said to be derived from the Old English term ‘lufu’ which have Germanic origin from an Indo-European root shared by Sanskrit ‘tubhyati’ meaning desire. Love is used as a noun as well as a verb.

Heart shape is symbolic of Love

What is hate?

Hate is an intense dislike towards a person or a thing. Hate is often associated with negative feelings such as anger, hostility and violence. Hate is a destructive emotion and could originate from sentiments like dislike, ignorance or jealousy. Many religions in the world, advocate against hate and encourage love.

The word hate is derived from Old English term hatian (verb), hete (noun), of Germanic origin. In a grammatical sense, hate is only used as a verb. The noun of hate is hatred.

However, as the old saying goes there is a thin line between love and hate. It does not take much time for love to turn into hatred or vice versa.